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by liketochill 1236 days ago
Or a lot of difference in elevation. With 900m head you can get 8 MW from only 1.5 m^3/s in a pipe less than 2 feet in diameter.
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900m is a huge elevation difference. The highest pumped power dam currently in Japan (by hydraulic height, after looking at almost all the Japanese hydro pages on English Wikipedia) is about 780 m; the median is just under 400 m. Presumably most of the other hydroelectric dams have already been investigated for pumped power, but lack a sufficiently large lower reservoir.